700,000 Meals a Day: The Women Building Africa's Green Businesses

By Olivia Hart

A Kenyan nonprofit founded with A$1,200 (£630) now feeds more than 700,000 schoolchildren every day. That is the headline figure in a story that spans four countries and four women-led ventures — and behind it sits a harder number: in Nigeria, 56% of female entrepreneurs' last loan applications were denied, against 17% for men, according to the World Bank.

Africa is thought to have a higher proportion of female entrepreneurs than any other continent. Yet access to capital remains the fault line running through each of these four businesses, from tyre recycling in Ibadan to peanut-shell briquettes in Malawi.

What does 700,000 daily meals take?

Wawira Njiru started small. In 2012, while studying nutrition in Australia, she raised A$1,200 and built a makeshift kitchen in Ruiru, 12 miles from Nairobi, serving 25 children one meal a day.

"Teachers said food was the biggest need. Kids were fainting," she says. "One teacher said they used to keep packs of glucose in the staff room for when a child faints. I thought that was insane. Why don't we just feed them?"

Nearly 15 years later, Food4Education runs 209 kitchens, employs 6,000 people and buys about 130 tonnes of food a day — roughly 80% of it from local smallholder farmers. A digital platform verifies who is eating before the next day's food is produced, keeping waste at about 2%.

The flagship Nairobi kitchen feeds about 60,000 children and runs on solar and steam. Kitchens are shifting to eco-briquettes made from sawdust and agricultural waste. Njiru puts the stakes plainly: cooking for every child in Kenya on firewood would be "equivalent to 1.1m acres of forest being cut down... about three times the size of London."

In early 2026, when hot weather left 5,000 mango farmers in Murang'a county with unsellable surplus, Food4Education bought 1.3 million mangoes over a couple of weeks and distributed them to schoolchildren.

Her workforce is predominantly female, partly because, she says, men would not take kitchen jobs. "I'll never forget the man who once told me he'd rather be jobless than work in a kitchen."

Can waste tyres become an industrial business?

On the outskirts of Ibadan, Ifedolapo Runsewe's Freee Recycle shreds thousands of discarded tyres into granules that become playground surfaces, gym flooring, paving blocks and interlocking tiles.

Runsewe left banking after more than 12 years and founded the company in 2020, convinced by the fact that almost every part of a tyre can be recovered. The factory employs about 62 people and collects tyres from four Nigerian states: Oyo, Lagos, Osun and Kwara.

The financing bias was explicit. "I'd go into banks and boardrooms, and investors would assume the man next to me is the owner," she says. "As soon as I spoke, the question came up: why should we give a woman millions, hundreds of millions?"

She rejects the framing of her company as a gender story. "I don't think organisations choose to work with us because we're female-owned. They see a brand that is good, transparent, credible and ethical." Partners include Michelin, Save the Children and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Nigeria generates millions of waste tyres a year; many are burned to recover scrap metal. "Burning tyres releases a complex mix of toxic chemicals – it's not just pollution, it's a direct public health threat," says Oladele Ogunseitan, a presidential chair at the University of California, Irvine.

Runsewe plans Nigeria's first aerosol-recycling facility, and a 2025 art residency turns tyres into works inspired by the Bata drum, Ikom monoliths and Benin bronzes.

How does solar irrigation change farming?

Kyokushaba Shine, 31, watched her mother's onion harvests near Kabale fail for lack of water. In February 2025 she founded Winta Engineering Solutions in Uganda with no staff and no capital.

In just over a year the company has installed 30 water systems, mostly solar powered, more than 10 for female farmers. Her team is 80% women. Farmers get microfinance loans of about 5m Ugandan shillings (about £1,000), usually repayable within two years.

"It's not enough to have sufficient water if the soil is degraded," she says — hence awareness campaigns on fertiliser overuse and soil health.

Can peanut shells replace charcoal?

In Dedza, Malawi, Chifuno Stevens, 35, started the Chifuno Changa Green Initiative in September 2020 with 18 women from the Dauya Ladies Environmental Group. They make clean-burning briquettes from peanut shells; sister business Dedza Pottery uses them as backup fuel.

Since early 2026, CCGI has added sewing classes producing reusable kitenge-fabric tote bags and tourist workshop tours. Constraints persist: year-round peanut-shell supply is unreliable, equipment is lacking and finance barriers have capped growth. "My ultimate aim is for CCGI to become a financially sustainable business rather than one that depends entirely on external aid," Stevens says.

Across all four ventures, the pattern holds: the models work, the demand exists, and capital — not capability — is the bottleneck.